CLIMATE:

Scientists, celebrities to cruise with Gore to Antarctica

Former Vice President Al Gore is taking his fight against climate change to Antarctica next week as part of a cruise organized by his Climate Reality Project.

Gore and more than 100 fellow travelers will depart from Argentina late next week. Scientists, including climatologists James Hansen of NASA and Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, will give talks during the journey.

Other attendees include Bangladesh's minister of environment and forests, Hasan Mahmud, and British billionaire Richard Branson, who blogged about the trip last month.

"Today is the 100th anniversary of Roald Amundsen and his team's successful trip to the South Pole. Next month I'm going to Antarctica with [my family] to celebrate that trip and also Capt Robert Scott (who was a relative of ours) incredible voyage there," Branson wrote on Dec. 14. "Sadly as you know he perished on the way home. We're going on a boat organised by Al Gore to learn as much as we can from scientists and experts about where we are in the worrying cycle of Global Warming."

The Antarctic voyage is part of a larger campaign to focus attention on the threat climate change poses to the world's ice sheets and glaciers -- a subject Gore highlighted in his 2007 documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," and at a 2009 conference he convened with Norway's foreign minister, Jonas Gahr Støre.

"This winter we will be talking about Antarctica as part of our 'Living on Thin Ice' campaign which will focus on how people around the globe are being impacted by the melting of the world's ice," Climate Reality Project spokesman Eric Young said. "As part of that effort, we are journeying to Antarctica with our chairman, Vice President Gore, and leading scientists and thinkers to see firsthand how the climate crisis is unfolding."

Antarctica is not the only stop for Gore's campaign, Young said, which has convened events in Ecuador, the Sierra Nevada and Brooklyn and is planning trips to Nepal and the Alps.